New Delhi: BJP veteran L K Advani on Friday said late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru`s secularism was based on Hindu foundations.
Quoting Nehru at the AICC session in 1961, Advani said the leader`s "speech clearly spelt out India`s ancient but constantly self-renewing culture as the `silken bond` that unites our diversities into `one country`".
In a blog entry titled `Even Nehru`s secularism was based on Hindu foundations`, Advani said, "the BJP and the RSS hold that the basis of Indian nationalism is our culture."
At the AICC session in Madurai in October 1961, Advani said, Nehru had remarked that India has "for ages past been a country of pilgrimages."
"All over the country you find these ancient places, from Badrinath, Kedarnath and Amarnath, high up in the snowy Himalayas down to Kanyakumari in the south," he wrote quoting Nehru`s speech at the AICC session.
"What has drawn our people from the south to the north and from the north to the south in these great pilgrimages? It is the feeling of one country and one culture and this feeling has bound us together," Nehru had said.
Advani quoted Nehru saying that ancient books had mentioned that Bharat stretched from the Himalayas in the north to the seas in the south.
"This conception of Bharat as one great land which the people considered a holy land has come down the ages and has joined us together, even though we have had different political kingdoms and even though we may speak different languages. This silken bond keeps us together in many ways," the BJP veteran said quoting Nehru.
PTI
